Saturday, April 9, 2011

Visual studio Lightswitch Step by Step – Introduction (Part 1)

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new flavor of Visual studio family that gives the users a simpler and faster way to create High-quality business applications for the desktop and the cloud. It is oriented to build forms over data business applications quickly and easily reducing the code base required to implement the CRUD. One of the main features is an intuitive designer that helps developers construct the applications using different data sources and designing screens in a much simpler and faster way.

Architecture

LightSwitch applications are built on classic three-tier architecture. Each tier runs independently of the others and performs a specific role in the application. The presentation tier is responsible for human interaction with the application. Its primary concern is data visualization and editing. The logic tier processes requests from a client to fetch data, update data, or to perform other operations. This tier’s primary role is to shield direct access to the data from unwanted or invalid reads and updates. This helps to ensure the long-term integrity and security of the data. The data storage tier is responsible for durable storage of the application data.

Lightswitch team has a very good post series on the Anatomy of the Lightswitch application that gives more details on the architecture and the Presentation, Logic and Data storage tiers. Next we’ll create a sample lightswitch application and explore the features.